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Tuesday, July 12, 2016

A Note About ID Numbers on the FamilySearch Family Tree

A friend of mine had a question about the connection between the FamilySearch.org Family Tree and the membership records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I guess I didn't understand her questions at first, but I finally grasped what she was talking about. Back in the days of new.FamilySearch.org, the membership records of the Church and the old program were directly connected. If you saw a mistake in new.FamilySearch.org in your own personal record, you had to go to your ward clerk to get it corrected. As part of the information used to "seed" the original program, the Church membership records were included.

Remember that the information in the original database from new.FamilySearch.org was used in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree so the Family Tree has "membership" information. It was widely circulated that the ID numbers for the "members" began with a "K..." This designation was used by some people to identify which of their ancestors were "members." However, the ID numbers were essentially arbitrary and I never put much stock in trying to classify the people in the Family Tree by any ID number sequence.

Now, fast forward a number of years. Some time ago, more than a year or so, the connection between the membership records and the Family Tree was completely severed. There is no correlation between the ID number assigned to a person and their "membership" in the Church. This has been the case for some considerable time. Stop trying to figure out some pattern to ID numbers. There may be some underlying patterns but the numbers certainly appear random. They are essentially accession numbers arbitrarily assigned as people are added to the Family Tree.

If someone knows anything more about the pattern of these numbers, please make a comment, but otherwise this is no longer a concern.